Ready, Willing and Able to Be Your Own Boss: New Brunswick Association for Community Living’s New Project
FREDERICTON – Becoming an entrepreneur is tough.
There are lots of hoops to jump through, red tape to navigate and the risk of failure is high.
It’s even higher if you have an intellectual disability or autism.
The New Brunswick Association for Community Living (NBACL) is working to change that.
The organization is working on an entrepreneurial initiative that will help people with intellectual disabilities explore self-employment as an option to break into the labour market. The initiative is part of a larger project by Ready, Willing and Able that aims to increase the rate of employment for persons with intellectual disabilities and autism.
“There are building blocks for what this whole project is about. One big one is employer awareness and creating employer demand,” says Jon Lister, director of labour market facilitation for NBACL. “But another one is self-employment as an alternate route into the labour force besides just an hourly wage. It’s creating their own opportunities.”
NBACL is currently researching similar programs around the world to help develop a model that’s tailored for New Brunswick. But Lister says a big part of the model will be providing groups and agencies that help entrepreneurs with the tools and materials needed to assist those with intellectual disabilities or autism. This include banks, employment agencies, startup incubators, you name it.
“That means the individuals have the information and the planning documents and know where to go in the community to make the right decisions and know who to connect with at certain points. That the employment agencies are able to provide that support role and know who to connect them with and how to provide support around self-employment,” Lister says. “It also means that the funding agencies are able to increase their capacity to support individuals with intellectual disability or autism to move into self-employment.”
The program would provide things like training and orientation materials to help increase agencies’ capacity to work with people with intellectual disabilities or autism. Persons with intellectual disabilities would essentially go through the same steps any aspiring entrepreneur would, they just might need a little more help in some areas.
“Each disability exists within a person. It’s unique to that person. So people with the disability label of autism are going to have different strengths and weaknesses,” Lister says. “We want to create a model that’s comprehensive enough that we work with the individual’s strengths and we identify the area where they may need support and then put those supports in place, whatever they may look like.”
Ask any entrepreneur and they’ll tell you starting a business isn’t easy. But when you have an intellectual disability, you have a whole other level of challenges you’ve got to face, one of the biggest being community attitude.
“That’s all due to misconceptions about individuals [with intellectual disabilities] and what they are able to do,” Lister says. “Systemic barriers mostly, and that’s why we want to increase everybody’s capacity to work together.”
Lister says they’ve reached out to many organizations and agencies already, and have received much support.
“Everybody’s on board, they just want to know how they can help. What’s their role? What are they going to be responsible for? That’s really important,” Lister says. “The model is still being created, but that’s what we want to be able to do.”
Since they are still in the research phase of the program, Lister says they are open to any feedback and advice from the province’s startup and entrepreneurship community. In fact, they are putting together a steering committee to help develop the strategy after research is complete. If you think you have something to contribute, drop NBACL a line.
“Even just to talk about some of the things that we should be aware of in starting up a business.” Lister says. “What they see as potentially some of the major barriers and challenges; so that when we’re creating the model we can implement those things and put those things into the model itself and the materials.”
Besides helping people with intellectual disabilities or autism explore self-employment, Lister says the program will help change attitudes around how much they can contribute to the community and the local economy.
“A successful, self-employed person with an intellectual disability or autism could be a member of a chamber of commerce, could potentially hire other people,” he says. “What is that going to do to change people’s minds? That’s massive.”
NBACL expects to start rolling out materials and training with agencies this fall.
“That’s the goal, to have all of that developed and begin rolling that out so we can really start with the implementation phase. Moving people through the process,” Lister says.
Like many people who take the plunge into entrepreneurship, some ultimately decide it’s not for them. That may be the case for some who go through this program. But people with intellectual disabilities or autism should have the opportunity to explore this option, just like anybody else.
“It’s about choice. It’s about options and it’s about increasing the amount of choice that individuals have to pursue these things,” Lister says. “Right now, it may exist, but not for everybody. We need to increase that.”